Boxoffice Pro - April 2020

ON SCREEN EVENT CINEMA
Image courtesy Fathom Events
2020 AND
BEYOND
Industry Experts on the
Future of Event Cinema
BY REBECCA PAHLE
In the world of event cinema, records
get broken every year. In the U.K.
and Ireland, the birthplace of event cinema,
2019’s yearly box office of £53.7 million
earned from 130 new titles easily eclipsed
the previous record, 2018’s £41.3 million.
The top-grossing title in the U.K. and
Ireland, National Theatre Live’s Fleabag,
became the highest grosser ever in those
territories, with a cumulative revenue of
£4.3 million. For Fathom Events, the year
started strong—with a record-breaking $11
million at the box office in January—and
ended to the tune of a record $80 million.
Contributing to that eight-figure January
gross was their U.S. release of BTS World
Tour Love Yourself in Seoul, one of two
2019 concert films that proved the massive
money-earning potential of K-pop powerhouse
BTS on the big screen (the second,
Bring the Soul: The Movie, was brought
to theaters by Trafalgar Releasing). One
of Fathom’s cornerstone series, TCM Big
Screen Classics, in 2019 saw a 16 percent
increase in both revenue and attendance
from the previous year.
With another year of event-cinema
programming behind us and new
releases lining up to break ground over
the coming months, Boxoffice Pro took
the chance to speak to experts in the space
to find out where things are headed in
2020 and beyond.
Cinema / Culture
According to BY Experience co-founder
Julie Borchard-Young, opera, theater, and
ballet form the bedrock of event cinema.
“Without those three, there would be no
[event cinema] business,” she says. “They
are the meat and potatoes.”
But with event cinema’s record breakers
increasingly coming from other genres—like
anime, TV shows, and concerts—
do the more “traditional” categories still
play a key role?
Distributors in the event-cinema space
are betting that the industry’s “meat and
184 April 2020